Quotes About Memory

Believe me—I spent some uncomfortable moments with my head that morning. Because I'd read The Rolling Stones fifteen years before—and forgotten it completely. Or had I?

He told himself he had never felt so happy, and he felt a sort of ache that this was happening and would never again happen in just this way no matter how long he lived.

He told himself he had never felt so happy, and he felt a sort of ache that this was happening and would never happen again in just this way no matter how long he lived.

Each was a talisman with magical properties. They were imbued with memory, story, and event, and in the course of time had gone from mere phenomena to sacred vessels of personal history. They were simultaneously a nuisance and completely necessary. My mother had grown old without losing the better part of innocence when it came to keepsakes. "Look

Edward   Once they're dead, I find they keep changing. You think you've got hold of them. And it's like you say, 'Oh I see. So that's what she was like.' But then they change again in your memory. It drives you crazy. Now I'd like to find out just who she was.

The answer is that we don't finish our work when we die. It lives on after us. What we have done on earth, if it amounts to anything, continues after we die physically. How could there be rewards and judgments when our earthly life is over? Our influence upon friends, family, the people we knew during our lifetimes, does not cease when our obituaries appear in the local paper.

People often think there is no way to heal from severe loss. I believe that is not true. You heal when you can remember those who have died with more love than pain, when you find a way to create meaning in your own life in a way that will honor theirs. It requires a decision and a desire to do this, but finding meaning is not extraordinary, it's ordinary. It happens all the time, all over the world.

I don't want to have to tell them that my life lost all its meaning when they died. They loved me, and they wouldn't want that.

Ultimately, meaning comes through finding a way to sustain your love for the person after their death while you're moving forward with your life.

Death leaves trails of mutes.

It all started, like so many family stories, with a plausible fiction - honest mistake, faulty memory, bit of embroidered imagination that got repeated so many times it became family truth.

When you get down to the bottom of it, only about half of what we remember really happened. We tend to modify things to make ourselves look better in our own eyes and in the eyes of others. Then, if what we did wasn't really very admirable, we tend to forget that it ever happened. A normal human being's grasp on reality is very tenuous at best. Our imaginary lives are usually much nicer.

We pencil-sketch our previous life so we can contrast it to the technicolor of the moment.

If this continues, if this goes on, then when I die, your memories of me will be my greatest accomplishment. You memories will be my most lasting impressions.

there was a time before you but I can't remember it now a time before your beauty and I were formally introduced I'm sure I lived without you but I don't remember how can't imagine living without these feelings you've produced just one glance and my life was redrawn just one word and my vocabulary changed I asked the time and you said 'what's the hurry?' you asked my name and I almost forgot

You can give words, but you can't take them. And when words are given and received, that is when they are shared. We remember what that was like. Words so real they were almost tangible. There are conversations you remember, for certain. But more than that, there is the sensation of conversation. You will remember that, even when the precise words begin to blur.

Once time is lit, it will burn whether or not you're breathing it in. Even after smoke becomes air, there is the memory of smoke. I am seeing as if by the light of a match, a glimpse of my life and having it feel right.

Yesterday is another world. I want to go back there.

Sometimes memory tricks you. Sometimes beauty is best when it's distant.

There's no way to release yourself from a memory. It ends when it wants to end, whether it's in a flash or long after you've begged it to stop.

The words that matter always stay.

I have become very good at clearing histories.

She is my first and only love. Most people know that their first love will not be their only love. But for me, she is both.

A photograph it a souvenir of a memory. It is not a moment. It is the looking at the photograph that becomes the moment. Your own moment.